Reply #3: I have a few concerns, [View All]

[Julien Sorel]

and I'm hardly a tinfoil hatter.

First of all, you're denigrating the accuracy of exit polls, then citing data from exit polls to prove your point. It hardly makes sense.

Second, and what I really find bizarre, is the people who ran the exit polls haven't come up with a really good explanation as to why they have always worked in the past, but didn't this time. What they're saying now is that Kerry voters were more enthusiastic and wanted to tell the world whom they voted for, but why has this never happened in any other election that I'm aware of? In any election, one side or the other is going to be pretty enthusiastic about their candidate; I can imagine some countries getting to vote for the first time, where they would be absolutely ecstatic about the opportunity to vote for a candidate. Exit polls work in those countries, but they don't here? It makes no sense.

Third, the telephone polls taken on the eve of and the same day as the election predicted results consistent with the exit polls, and inconsistent with the actual vote tallies.

I'm sure you're aware that undecideds break for the challenger, and I'm not aware of a single national poll that had Bush at 50% of the popular vote. Most of them had him at 47 and 48%, as I recall -- consistent with the exit polls that had him at 48%.


There's a whole lot of information suggesting Bush should have gotten about 48% of the vote, which is what the exit polls said he got, and none at all that say he would have gotten 51% of the vote, which he actually got. It looks funny to me, and I'd like a better explanation than the one being passed around about the "enthusiasm" of Kerry voters. Right up until the election, in fact, we were being told how unenthusiastic Kerry voters were, how they were really ABB voters. Now it turns out they were actually overflowing with excitement for Kerry.


I'm a stickler for logic to an almost unhealthy degree, and this doesn't add up for me.